Steve Hackett is the most amazing guitarist in the world. Years ago I did an acrylic painting of him, standing up- circa `Seconds Out era ,' with lightening blasting his guitar. Surreal images were indicated in his dark surroundings. This image of Steve was from blurry photo reference taken by me 15 years later than my original image, at the `Bottom Line' in New York City 1992. I updated it with Opalpaint on the Amiga (and DCTV), 10 years ago, but with a small blurry 300 x 200 file, I thought that it needed to be `modernized'... so I redrew the picture in Fractal Painter, adding more detail as well as modifying the images. After seeing Steve at the NEARfest 2002 show- which he performed an amazing set, I was inspired to make the image larger, getting rid of the spacey background and providing more atmosphere to the piece. The image of Steve remained the same with the exception of adding more shadows and colors. I also simplified the roots and vines growing from his legs. This compressed image is only 25% of the original piece, which barely hints at the hundred plus hours of work I put on it. I added additional surreal images that hopefully reflects Mr. Hackett's compositions- some are obvious, a few are harder-to-read symbolic references. I sent a copy of the old image to Steve's website but did not get any feedback.

Recently, I re-sent it to Steve's new site and he responsed with a nice note. Thanks Steve!

The most difficult thing to do? Making Steve look `realistic!' ... well.. at least his upper torso.

I cut an old image of Steve from revision #2 out and added more vines and woody elements and used the